It starts at the five

and dime

Sun 10.14.18

I had a dream last night in which I find myself in a town walking down its main street with its row of stores. None of it interests me. When I get to the end of the street and turn the corner having been told that there are more stores, I find this not to be so. What I find are a couple of back doors to the main street stores like the ones I remember in my hometown, especially the dime store. Further on, I come upon an emporium, which I enter. One part of it houses a restaurant. I approach the Maitre d’s station and there find what I think is a small menu. It is a customer check with funds to cover the bill. I hand it to the clerk explaining my mistake and she hands me a very large menu and urges the stuffed lobster on me. “I’ll go off and find what the market price is today,” she says. Do I want stuffed lobster, no. I don’t want anything, and I walk off.

As a small child I would go to Woolworth’s five and dime with my brothers. I understood that most of the clothes was junk, but the toy department was interesting. I would look at doll clothes that were always way too big or too small to fit my dolly. I loved the little painted metal tea sets and the dinner plates. We never had money, but occasionally my brothers or I would snatch some worthless thing, which was kept for a day or two then tossed as the useless thing it was.

It’s all junk, isn’t it? Even the stuffed lobster, or the Lamborghini, Why Lamborghini? I learned this week that Iran has produced such a luxury sportscar, https://en.mehrnews.com/news/138674/VIDEO-Iran-s-reverse-engineered-Lamborghini-unveiled. Check out the guy on the right. Do you think Hassan Rouhani, the president and Islamic cleric, covets one of these beauties, or even the most holy Supreme Leader, the Ayatolla Ali Khamenei? Probably not. It seems outlandish that Iranians whose women have about as much rights as a dog, who from childhood on must cover their hair with the hijab in public and obey the menfolk till the day they die on penalty of imprisonment are intent on producing luxury cars. Does the world we live in make less and less sense? Undoubtedly, the Iranian leadership wants to enter the world market with this new car because it doesn’t look like any of the people watching the car’s unfolding could possibly afford it. Check out the women doing the unfolding, a bit racy for Islamic sharia laws. Granted they’re covered up but those sexy shoes suggest . . . You enter the world market at your value’s risk, Rouhani. Soon they’ll be wearing bikinis and shaking their booty.

What produces happiness and well being is so simple and has nothing to do with money. But well being is not what it’s about, is it? Ask the albino rat in his cage performing ridiculous stunts for the guy behind the glass so he can get his little pellets. But like a lot of us, he doesn’t understand that his little stunts are supporting the idiot behind his glass cage, the pellet company that produces his food, the university where his cage resides, even the state where he lives and the country where it is located. It all starts with the trinkets at the five and dime, the doll clothes and the little painted tea set.